Academic Research

Program Director

Description

This program aims to encourage researchers to focus on research questions and issues concerned with agile software development. Most grants are expected to be small, and to be less than $8,000, but the program will consider larger grant applications (up to $20,000) where the proposed research will have significant impact. Activities supported by small grants include conducting a series of visits to practitioner sites, performing interviews, supporting a researcher for a short time to extend existing work into agile development, running workshops, and so on. An example submitter might be a researcher who is prohibited from conducting research into agile practice because of a lack of funds to support travel and other expenses. Another example might be a researcher wanting to be supported for an additional month to extend their analysis into agile development.

The research supported by this fund should be of interest to the practitioner community as well as to academics, and the review committee includes practitioners from the Agile Alliance Board of Directors as well as academic researchers.

Submissions are welcome from a wide range of subject areas including Psychology, Business, Sociology, Software Engineering and CSCW.

How to Apply

The program is not accepting new submissions.

The Proposal

Your proposal should be no more than 3 pages in length, and should contain the following items:

A one-sentence description of the work to be undertaken

A figure stating how much money you are asking for from the AgileAlliance, and a specific statement of which aspect of your research programme these funds will support.

A description and justification for the resources required to conduct the research and a clear indication of where these resources will come from. For example if you require specialist software to log programmer interaction, or access to Agile testers, please explain how these resources will be obtained.

An explanation of the significance of this work and its likely impact on current or future software development practice. This should place your current proposal in the context of other published work in Agile development, and indicate how it will enhance existing knowledge in the area.

A description of the expected outcome(s) of the research

An outline schedule for the research, showing how soon you require the funding, and how soon after that the final report will be available.

A justified description of the research methods being used.

The Submission Process

The program is not accepting new submissions.

The Evaluation Process

At each deadline, the submitted proposals will be considered by a panel of industry and academic reviewers, appointed by the AgileAlliance Board.

The criteria for consideration will include the quality of the research to be undertaken, significance of the expected outcomes, the feasibility of the proposed research, and the level of funding requested. The committee has a limited amount of funding available and it may therefore necessary to prioritise submissions against each other. This does not preclude re-submission of a rejected proposal for a later deadline.

We will endeavour to provide a response within one month of the deadline. If you have heard nothing after a month, then please email Helen Sharp.

Conditions Of Funding

If you accept funding for your research, then you are expected to produce a final report summarising the research for inclusion on the Agile Alliance website. This should be submitted within two months of the proposed research end date.

It is the policy of the Academic Research program that all funds granted are intended for, and therefore must be utilized by, the research grant recipient exclusively.

We encourage all applicants to submit their work to a major agile conference such as XP20xx or Agile20xx.